STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. I9 



colonies, wherever the Httle young birds are growing up, some- 

 body is looking out for them and protecting them. And so we 

 have increased these birds of our own sea coast here, on the 

 Gulf of Mexico, on the Pacific coast, on many lakes in the west, 

 and everywhere where they are breeding in colonies. Thirty 

 years ago there were only about a dozen or twenty pairs of 

 Laughing Gulls left in New England. They were on Muskeget 

 Island. A warden was put on that island every year during the 

 breeding season to protect them. Today, thousands are there, 

 and they have scattered along the coast from Massachusetts 

 to Maine. Mrs. Russell Sage has recently established a large 

 reservation of this kind in Louisiana, for water birds and land 

 birds. The Rockefeller Foundation has established another, 

 and these reservations will in the end be the salvation of the 

 birds. 



There is another danger that menaces our small birds and it 

 is the foreigners that come from other shores, who kill birds in 

 their own countries. Here they destroy some of our most beau- 

 tiful and useful birds. We welcome those people. They must 

 come here to do our work, but we must try to teach them not to 

 kill our small birds. In the south both blacks and whites 

 kill small birds. Three years ago I was in South Carolina 

 and I watched a dozen colored men shooting bobolinks and 

 other small birds. At noon thev came and sat on a levee or 

 dike as they called it and ate their lunch, and I went there 

 and asked them how many birds they had. They laid out their 

 burlap bags in which the birds were kept and counted them out 

 by the dozen, and if their count was correct, they had killed 

 over a thousand of those birds that forenoon. These birds come 

 in great flocks and they are supposed to be killed because they 

 eat rice. But there the rice culture is going out. It is almost 

 extinct and these birds are not killed for that purpose at all 

 but for the twenty-five cents that the blacks get for the birds 

 and for the sixty or seventy cents which the whites get when 

 they sell them again. That is the reason they are shot today in 

 the south and that same sort of thing has been going on all over 

 the south. We have now a law — a Federal law — for the pro- 

 tection of migratory birds, which, if we can enforce it, will 

 eventually do away with the most of this shooting. 



Now, having given you some idea of the public means we are 

 taking to protect our birds, let me approach the most interesting 



